Sojourn

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Sojourn
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs (bio), Michelle Lanier (bio), and Johnica Rivers (bio)

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Luminous and Suspicious Person #1, by S. Erin Batiste, 2022. Mixed media collage, 9 × 10 in. All images from the Major Arcana series, which transforms early twentieth-century mugshots of Black women and girls (likely the only photographs from their lifetime), from the New Orleans Public Library archive.

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SOMETIMES YOU CAN prepare for a sojourn. Plan your route. Gather resources. Train your breathing. Maybe you will visualize your success. Chant the names you will need to remember. Pray for strength. Some of us write a list of days. Notify our loved ones. Give away our excess. But what you cannot know at the beginning of a sojourn is who you will be on the other side. This is what we want for you.

We do not know how Harriet Jacobs—or for that matter Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, or any other freedom-seeking formerly enslaved woman—chanted our names, planned for our daring recklessness, gathered seeds we would one day plant. We do not know specifically what Harriet Jacobs saw during her fevered dreams as she almost died in the garret above her grandmother's rat-invaded storeroom. What Tubman saw in her dreams the night before she woke up and said, "My people are free." What Truth saw when she blinked and knew her name. But we do know that they committed to move from one state of being to another, even when that movement came through profound stillness. And we do know that their movement had an impact on us. The place we find [End Page 3]

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Luminous and Suspicious Person #4 by S. Erin Batiste, 2024. Mixed media collage, 9 × 10 in.

[End Page 4] ourselves now. The place we lose ourselves constantly. This is where we meet you. In a multigenerational field of faith. A brave unknowing.

And so, we hope that as you witness the gathered offerings, conversations, analytical texts, creative writing, and visual artistry here you will tarry and forget yourself. Find yourself in another possibility.

When you sojourn "In the Swamp" with kai lumumba barrow and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, will you remember that Harriet Jacobs slept among the water moccasins, hiding in a swampland, while her kin prepared a hiding place in the crevices of the home of (self-freed) Molly? Will you move toward what abolition requires without having to know what exactly you will personally lose?

When you follow Beatrice J. Adams into "Habitual Return," will you hold the possibility that each time participants in the Great Migration returned, they returned to a different version of the same place, as different folks? And you too may come back to the page differently, possibly with a different idea of what leaving is and what home can be for you and yours?

When you stop at Jovonna Jones's "A Rooming House for Transient Girls," consider that you do not even know what you will need where you are going and that you "would be surprised" at the sacrifices already made for your arrival.

When you listen to Letitia Huckaby in conversation with Jessica Lynne about her photographic takeover of the courthouse near Harriet Jacobs's home in Edenton, North Carolina, where her family members and many others were declared to be property or free, will you consider your shadow? What if the spaces where you feel like a mere shadow of yourself right now are exactly the spaces you should take over? What if you forget about yourself while you listen as Letitia frees the shape of what we need to know?

And can you hear it? The sound of Jet Toomer's words percussing through the page? It's the cadence of beads on braids on hot skies, flying from the uplifted heads of Black girls, a citified reenactment of country things, the choreography of a return to Black South kin.

With Colony Little we are also carried to her maternal home places of North Texas, through portals of knowing unlocked by humidity, chigger bites, photographs, and questions that linger like the...